Of all natural forces, vitality is the incommunicable one.... Vitality never "takes." You have it or you haven't it, like health or brown eyes or a baritone voice.

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), U.S. author. repr. In The Crack-Up, ed. Edmund Wilson (1945). "The Crack-Up," Esquire (1936).
Fitzgerald illustrated this view of vitality with a biblical quote. See Bible: New Testament on disciples.

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), U.S. author. Letter (undated) to his daughter Frances Scott Fitzgerald. The Crack-Up, ed. Edmund Wilson (1945).
Fitzgerald was referring to the life of a writer: "So much writing nowadays suffers both from lack of an attitude and from sheer lack of any material, save what is accumulated in a purely social life."

I am not a great man, but sometimes I think the impersonal and objective equality of my talent and the sacrifices of it, in pieces, to preserve its essential value has some sort of epic grandeur.

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), U.S. author. Letter, 1940, to his daughter Frances Scott Fitzgerald. The Crack-Up, ed. Edmund Wilson (1945).
The words "some sort of epic grandeur" were used by Matthew J. Bruccoli as a title for his 1981 biography of Fitzgerald.